An invaluable guide for both casual opera fans and aficionados, 100 Great Operas is perhaps the most comprehensive and enjoyable volume of opera stories ever written. ,From La Traviata to A??da, from Carmen to Don Giovanni, here are the plots of the world???s best-loved operas, told in an engaging, picturesque, and readable manner. Written by noted opera authority Henry W. Simon, this distinctive reference book contains act-by-act descriptions of 100 operatic works ranging from the historic early seventeenth century masterpieces of Monteverdi to the modern classics of Gian-Carlo Menotti.,In addition to highlighting the most important aspects of each opera, the author discusses the main characters, the famous turnings of plot, and the most significant arias. Here, too, is a wealth of anecdotes concerning literary background, past performances and stars, and production problems of the great operas.
More than two hundred extracts from literature, biographies, memoirs, reportage, and poetry introduce the giants of science and explore the impact of science on the world.
Only once we understand the long history of human efforts to draw sustenance from the land can we grasp the nature of the crisis that faces humankind today, as hundreds of millions of people are faced with famine or flight from the land. From Neolithic times through the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East, in savannahs, river valleys and the terraces created by the Incas in the Andean mountains, an increasing range of agricultural techniques have developed in response to very different conditions. These developments are recounted in this book, with detailed attention to the ways in which plants, animals, soil, climate, and society have interacted.,Mazoyer and Roudart???s A History of World Agriculture is a path-breaking and panoramic work, beginning with the emergence of agriculture after thousands of years in which human societies had depended on hunting and gathering, showing how agricultural techniques developed in the different regions of the world, and how this extraordinary wealth of knowledge, tradition and natural variety is endangered today by global capitialism, as it forces the unequal agrarian heritages of the world to conform to the norms of profit.,During the twentieth century, mechanization, motorization and specialization have brought to a halt the pattern of cultural and environmental responses that characterized the global history of agriculture until then. Today a small number of corporations have the capacity to impose the farming methods on the planet that they find most profitable. Mazoyer and Roudart propose an alternative global strategy that can safegaurd the economies of the poor countries, reinvigorate the global economy, and create a livable future for mankind.
“A wonderful, splendid book???a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future.” ???Howard Fast,With a new introduction by Anthony Arnove, this edition of the classic national bestseller chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools???with its emphasis on great men in high places???to focus on the street, the home and the workplace.,Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History of the United States is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of???and in the words of???America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles???the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality???were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.,Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term, A People’s History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.
Most children go through a dinosaur phase. Learning all the tongue twisting names, picking favorites based on ferocity, armor, or sheer size. For many kids this love of ???terrible lizards??? fizzles out at some point between starting and leaving primary school. All those fancy names slowly forgotten, no longer any need for a favorite.,For all those child dino fanatics who didn???t grow up to become paleontologists, dinosaurs seem like something out of mythology. They are dragons, pictures in books, abstract, other, extinct.,They are at the same time familiar and mysterious. And yet we???re in an age of rapid discovery???new dinosaur species and genera are being discovered at an accelerating rate, we???re learning more about what they looked like, how they lived, how they evolved and where they all went.,This series isn???t just a top trumps list of dino facts???we???re interested in the why and the how and like all areas of science there is plenty of controversy and debate.
In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, the 26-year-old Ernst Gombrich was invited by a publishing acquaintance to attempt a history of the world for younger readers. Amazingly, he completed the task in an intense six weeks, and , was published in Vienna to immediate success, and is now available in seventeen languages across the world. Toward the end of his long life, Gombrich embarked upon a revision and, at last, an English translation. , presents his lively and involving history to English-language readers for the first time. Superbly designed and freshly illustrated, this is a book to be savored and collected. In forty concise chapters, Gombrich tells the story of man from the stone age to the atomic bomb. In between emerges a colorful picture of wars and conquests, grand works of art, and the spread and limitations of science. This is a text dominated not by dates and facts, but by the sweep of mankind’s experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity’s achievements and an acute witness to its frailties. The product of a generous and humane sensibility, this timeless account makes intelligible the full span of human history.
Over 700,000 copies of the original hardcover and paperback editions of this stunningly popular book have been sold. Karen Armstrong’s superbly readable exploration of how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – have shaped and altered the conception of God is a tour de force. One of Britain’s foremost commentators on religious affairs, Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. From classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one compelling volume.
Written from a consciously anti-enthnocentric approach, this fascinating work is a survey of the civilizations of the modern world in terms of the broad sweep and continuities of history, rather than the “event-based” technique of most other texts.
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Kosovo is a plain where the serbs bend over to work the soil, Albanians sweat in the mining shafts underground, Turks (largely spent and reminiscing about past fame) grow poppies and peppers, while the Gypsies fill the air with the sounds of life.
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Kosovo is a plain where the serbs bend over to work the soil, Albanians sweat in the mining shafts underground, Turks (largely spent and reminiscing about past fame) grow poppies and peppers, while the Gypsies fill the air with the sounds of life.
